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gatesealer posted:I started up a playthrough of this thanks to the lp and I forgot just how random mutant powers are. My mutant had three cure spells at one point. It was ridiculous. I couldn't even go through 2 of them before I just needed to restore everyone else's abilities. Mutant powers aren't actually all that random, and you do have some modicum of control over them...in the sense that you can control what you lose, not when. I'd explain more, but only if Chokes is okay with it.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:04
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UmbreonMessiah posted:Mutant powers aren't actually all that random, and you do have some modicum of control over them...in the sense that you can control what you lose, not when. oh I know about controlling which ones I lose. I was talking more about what you get.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:17
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gatesealer posted:oh I know about controlling which ones I lose. I was talking more about what you get. You can also SORT of control what abilities you get, but only in a very vague sense. Once again, I'd explain the ability system, but only if Chokes is okay with it. But I will go on record against Chokes on something here: Monsters in FFL2 are amazing. In fact, Monster is legitimately the best class in the game. It is, however, not a very good idea to use 4 monsters. Hell, even using 3 Monsters is generally a bad idea (and I've done it). 2 is the most you'd ever want to have on a team, for reasons.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:19
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UmbreonMessiah posted:You can also SORT of control what abilities you get, but only in a very vague sense. Once again, I'd explain the ability system, but only if Chokes is okay with it. However, Monster is a class that really, seriously needs a guide by your side to use well. If you just cram every last piece of meat in your mouth you'll be consistently hovering several ranks below par and would be entirely justified in believing that the race was terrible. Mechs are almost as good as monsters and don't require a handy guide and/or memorization of transformation tables, is what I'm saying. That said, Mec + Human + 2 Monster is by far the easiest team to wreck the game with, if (and only if) you know how to game monster transformations. You could probably get by with 2 Mec + 2 Monster, too, but that would largely involve being incredibly consistent with monster form choice, since there are a few points in the game where you really want some form of Mana-based damage. Past that, your next easiest time will likely be with 2 Mec + 2 Human. KataraniSword fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 14:25
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KataraniSword posted:However, Monster is a class that really, seriously needs a guide by your side to use well. If you just cram every last piece of meat in your mouth you'll be consistently hovering several ranks below par and would be entirely justified in believing that the race was terrible. 2 Mec 2 Human is how you completely destroy whatever challenge the game had. The only thing that even comes close to challenging that setup in the hands of a knowledgeable player is the final boss. Actually, that's really the caveat with all SaGa games: their difficulty is proportional to how much of their obtuse mechanics you understand. I used to HATE FFL2 (and to a lesser extent, FFL) before I came to understand all the stuff that makes FFL2 tick. Now, FFL2 is my favorite game in the series...hell, it may just be one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:53
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Monsters have easy access to great stats and abilities, but natural abilities are noticeably weaker and have more limited uses than equipped items, so while they perform well they are never quite as awesome as they look on paper. They make up for this by having the meat system be gameable enough to get well ahead of the power curve from a very early point, but the meat system is tighter than FFL1 and there's a cap on how far you go, and the further you get in the game the less of an advantage they get. Mutants get a combination of abilities and equipment, but they have the worst stats in the game. They can't use powers as well as monsters can and they can't use equipment as well as humans can. Their silver lining is their ability to acquire endgame-level powers much earlier than monsters can (which can even potentially let them abuse sequence-breaking glitches.) Robots can equip items and it's easy for them to pump their stats to total shitwrecker levels. For physical attacks and single-target damage they utterly blow everything else out of the water, and if you're patient you can glitch them to be even more powerful. But their Mana is hard-capped at 0, so they have several liabilities: they can't use spellbooks, they take lots of damage from magic, and they're tough to heal. Humans have no easy shortcuts to power, but their stat growth is respectable enough and they can use all the game's best equipment--including spellbooks, which lets them beat mutants and monsters at their own game. They start out slower than other character types but by the lategame they can easily be the most powerful attackers out of anyone. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 15:22
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Gabriel Pope posted:Humans have no easy shortcuts to power, but their stat growth is respectable enough and they can use all the game's best equipment--including spellbooks, which lets them beat mutants and monsters at their own game. They start out slower than other character types but by the lategame they can easily be the most powerful attackers out of anyone. My 99 mana Mutant and ultimate monsters would like to have a word with your staff-wielding fleshbag 
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Oct 21, 2014 15:25
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UmbreonMessiah posted:My 99 mana Mutant and ultimate monsters would like to have a word with your staff-wielding fleshbag It takes ~80 mana for the best spellbook to outdamage the most powerful monster, and humans reach that point faster than mutants do. I guess if you grind your way to 99 mana mutants can tie humans, but that either takes RNG abuse or way too much free time.
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Oct 21, 2014 15:33
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Gabriel Pope posted:It takes ~80 mana for the best spellbook to outdamage the most powerful monster, and humans reach that point faster than mutants do. I guess if you grind your way to 99 mana mutants can tie humans, but that either takes RNG abuse or way too much free time. The appeal of Mutants anyway is more for utility than raw damage anyway, things like Barrier, Teleport, and early healing make a difference in the long run. Asura United posted:Didn't the translation group disband? IIRC, Saga 2 was still a little buggy on their last release. Most of SaGa 2 DS's problems are, appropriately enough, in the new content. In particular, the whole Threads of Fate system is confusing as hell and even though they try to explain it, the translation mangles it enough to make it even more confusing. SaGa 3 is done by a different team, and is about 99% completed; there's a few typos and the mashup combo names (the game has a combo system sort of like SaGa Frontier's) aren't translated, but that's the extent of what's unfinished.
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Oct 21, 2014 18:50
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Since people are clamoring about it ( thread discussion), forcing certain mutant abilities off your list has already been discussed but will eventually be featured in an update for storyline's/posterity's sake.It's not all that world-shattering. Just put the one you don't want the farthest down. As far as breaking the game goes, I don't really have any plans to show them off soon. But I have such sights to show you around the halfway point of this LP 
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Oct 21, 2014 19:25
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Yeah, but they were mentioning some way of potentially influencing what you were getting, not just what you were losing.
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Oct 21, 2014 19:29
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Chokes McGee posted:But I have such sights to show you around the halfway point of this LP please tell me poison is involved  that glitch is the most glorious thing and nobody outside of speedrun circles knows about it
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Oct 21, 2014 19:59
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Chokes McGee posted:As far as breaking the game goes, I don't really have any plans to show them off soon. But I have such sights to show you around the halfway point of this LP I look forward to you accidentally breaking the game through sheer luck and maybe a little wit. Spoilers? You're mad. Krumbsthumbs fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 20:45
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senrath posted:Yeah, but they were mentioning some way of potentially influencing what you were getting, not just what you were losing. Indeed. I guess I'll blow the lid on it (behind spoiler tags), since being teased about it for an entire page gets annoying if you don't know what the people are referring to. Mutant abiliites are learned not only through standard drops, but also from monsters. Each monster has its own special "level", and they can teach abilities of a lower level than itself. As you can probably assume, bosses have a pretty drat high level. If you were so inclined, you can savescum before a boss, then keep beating him until your mutant learns Gigaflare or Tiltowait. I'm sure Chokes will probably touch on this in a later update, and it sounds like he'll show it off in a bonus update, too. Now that I've completely broken this: Chokes McGee posted:
maybe we can hold off on discussing it 'til he shows it off?
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Oct 21, 2014 21:10
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Spoiler Policy
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I'd say this was unexpected, but given your name, I know you can't be up to any good
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Oct 22, 2014 00:22
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Fan art train toot toot
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Oct 22, 2014 01:43
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Camel Pimp posted:Fan art train toot toot Oh hi heather! Glad you could make the OP! 
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Oct 22, 2014 02:35
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UmbreonMessiah posted:I'd say this was unexpected, but given your name, I know you can't be up to any good It's true. Chokes is getting closer so I have to ruin the thread in a hurry!
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Oct 22, 2014 03:11
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Asura United posted:It's true. Chokes is getting closer so I have to ruin the thread in a hurry! And god drat did you almost do it. Good thing Roy is awesome  Seriously though, Ashura's put away, but Jesus loving Christ did I forget how balls-punchingly difficult this game is. I've adjusted and should be fine going forward now that I'm sandbagging fights correctly. We will go over these mechanics in Chapter 4, in which every minute Chokes gets owned hard. 
Chokes McGee fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 03:01
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Gotta earn that MAGI, son. This was the first JRPG I ever played, I bought it at a Wal-Mart during a visit to my grandmother's when I was, I dunno, nine or something. I had actually confused it with Final Fantasy Adventure which I'd read about in a video game magazine and wanted to play. When I got back to my grandmother's I realized that it wasn't the same game but once I started playing it I thought it was the coolest loving thing ever. Sadly I never did beat it for myself, though I made it pretty far despite having a minimal understanding of anything like "exploiting enemy vulnerabilities" or "equipping MAGI" or "basically anything at all." I made it to a certain boss fight in the later half of the game which was rough enough to stonewall me, and then the cartridge wound up going through the wash in my pants pocket and got completely ruined along with the save data. Thus ended my own FFL2 let's play experience.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:25
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Kai Tave posted:This was the first JRPG I ever played, I bought it at a Wal-Mart during a visit to my grandmother's when I was, I dunno, nine or something. I had actually confused it with Final Fantasy Adventure which I'd read about in a video game magazine and wanted to play.  " Managed to beat FFL3 on my own without reference to spoilers, but I get the impression that it's a hell of a lot more forgiving than the other two FFL games.quote:I made it to a certain boss fight in the later half of the game which was rough enough to stonewall me, and then the cartridge wound up going through the wash in my pants pocket and got completely ruined along with the save data. I had a Super Mario Land cart that I lost at a park as a kid. A year later I found the cart, in a hedge, covered with dirt. It had assuredly gotten rained on, sat in the mud, etc. I dusted it off and plugged it in and it still worked. I bet if FFL2 were a first-party title, it would have survived. Nintendo builds are freakin' indestructible.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:49
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Chokes McGee posted:And god drat did you almost do it. Good thing Roy is awesome Chokes, I wouldn't mind at some point if you talked about how to "level properly" in this game. I still have my FFL1 cart and my saved game from about 15 years ago, and I bought a GBASP101 and FFL2&3 in part due to your LP of the first game of the trilogy. I had an old-style GBA, but this one has the really good backlighting (and is black!). I had my problems with character advancement in 1 as you did with Rezen, though not quite as bad, but I've had a vague desire to play Legends 2 for a while and this LP is making me want to start it up even more. If I do play the game I am going to play a one-of-each party (and I'm sad to not see a monster in this party), but I would really like to know how to "level well" without breaking the game so that I don't gently caress myself over. It doesn't need to be part of the LP itself, but if you could post about it in good detail I'd consider it a favour.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:22
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JustJeff88 posted:Chokes, I wouldn't mind at some point if you talked about how to "level properly" in this game. I still have my FFL1 cart and my saved game from about 15 years ago, and I bought a GBASP101 and FFL2&3 in part due to your LP of the first game of the trilogy. I had an old-style GBA, but this one has the really good backlighting (and is black!). I had my problems with character advancement in 1 as you did with Rezen, though not quite as bad, but I've had a vague desire to play Legends 2 for a while and this LP is making me want to start it up even more. He's already mentioned the most important thing: you have to make sure that all your humans and mutants get at least 1 action before combat ends. Which is problematic, since robots and monsters are the faster-developing character types and they tend to have higher agility. Also, many guns and other high tech weapons do not train any attributes--leave them to your robots, because humans and mutants will suffer in the long term. Mutants have pretty low stat growth in general, particularly in strength. I also recommend giving humans and mutants dibs on Magi early on since they develop more slowly than robots/monsters.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:42
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Awww yeah, a bit late to the party but so awesome to see another Chokes LP.  FFL2 is basically one of my favorite classic RPGs, even if I think I was a little bit of a masochist as a kid. (I used a 2 human/2 mutant party on my first playthrough and got to the game's second to last boss with my mutants still in the low 300s in HP. I am honestly not sure how I managed to get that far, in retrospect, I do recall I ended up grinding a LOT to finish the game though. I like the DS version just about as much as this one, even if most of the added content is incomprehensible. There are some things about that version which are really cool, but I'm gonna hold off on discussing them until near the LP's end because they are pretty seriously dipping into spoiler territory, even with tags. Also, the Heal Staff is so expensive because it heals your entire party. Re: JustJeff88, my advice for leveling well if you're running a one-of-each party (in spoiler tags, in case Chokes doesn't wanna see): 1) Use a guide for monster meat, seriously 2) Agility is the god stat but you can't afford to completely neglect strength on everyone 3) Chokes is right about robots 4) Make sure everyone gets at least one action in battle, as mentioned 5) Psi knives are probably the cheapest way to level up Mana on humans, which you eventually want to do edit: Also, my FFL2 cart at least was pretty indestructible. Dropped that thing (along with associated game boy) in a river on a fishing trip while turned on like 20 years ago. Both still work. Reiska fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 05:15
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I did the same thing, except with FFL3 instead. "Hey, there's a sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure! Oh big time. FFL3 is the SaGa game that doesn't play by the byzantine and strict action=growth level up rules, and plays much more like a Final Fantasy, making it much more surmountable. Fittingly enough, Final Fantasy II for the Famicom plays instead like a SaGa game than like a Final Fantasy game proper. quote:I had a Super Mario Land cart that I lost at a park as a kid. A year later I found the cart, in a hedge, covered with dirt. It had assuredly gotten rained on, sat in the mud, etc. I dusted it off and plugged it in and it still worked. I bet if FFL2 were a first-party title, it would have survived. Nintendo builds are freakin' indestructible. Oh big time. I still have my first year released Game Boy somewhere at my mom's. It's literally held together by tape and dreams at this point, and it still runs near perfectly. And then there's the famous Game Boy that's a Gulf War veteran.
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Oct 23, 2014 05:24
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Reiska posted:I like the DS version just about as much as this one, even if most of the added content is incomprehensible. I used a guide to the Threads of Fate system while playing through it and it was STILL pants-shittingly confusing. Chokes McGee posted:And god drat did you almost do it. Good thing Roy is awesome Totally thought you meant ME me, and almost had a panic attack, not gonna lie. Yeah, Ashura functions as a pretty good wake-up call. You can generally bumble through the early game without a care in the world, but the Ashura fight is where the kid gloves get taken off and shoved straight up your posterior. --- Like several other people in the thread, FFL2 was my very first RPG. Played at the tender young age of 10 when I had no idea what the hell I was doing, I did just what I said earlier: I bumbled through the first world with no real idea what the hell I was doing. I used one of each class, my human sucked, my mutant was only useful for fire spells, and my monster was always some saw-awful skeleton or something. Then I got to world two, and things got less easy. I started running from fights more and more. My guys kept getting KO'd more often, so I'd run from fights more often. Eventually I somehow made it to Ashura, and he completely stonewalled me. I threw myself at him again and again, but there was no way I could even touch him. Ever since then, he's kind of been "that one boss" for me, the badass that became a God and slaughtered my party. Even now, many years later, I've still got a soft spot for the guy -- and the whole six-arms three-heads thing, as an extension -- hence my name. (I'd have put that in my opening post but you hadn't made mention of Ashura yet and I didn't want to spoil him being in this game too. In a few updates I can buy an avatar without spoiling anything, yay!)
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Oct 23, 2014 06:24
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Yeah, my first party was also a one-of-each-type deal and man, nine-year-old me had no clue what in the gently caress was going on. I ate every meat, I didn't understand how raising stats and stuff worked, I didn't quite get what made robots special. To be fair, like Chokes himself has pointed out the game does sweet gently caress-all in terms of actually explaining how any of this poo poo works. And even though this game came out back in the days when manuals were a thing, I don't think the manual really explained stuff very well either. None of that stopped me from playing the heck out of it, of course, but it's only just now, in this LP, that I've had someone explain the whole action-linked growth thing for instance (I did, however, figure out that you could equip MAGI on my own, so I've got that going for me).
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Oct 23, 2014 08:54
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Choco1980 posted:Oh big time. FFL3 is the SaGa game that doesn't play by the byzantine and strict action=growth level up rules, and plays much more like a Final Fantasy, making it much more surmountable. Fittingly enough, Final Fantasy II for the Famicom plays instead like a SaGa game than like a Final Fantasy game proper. IIRC, FF2 is actually the SaGa creator's first foray into RPGs, and then he went on to make SaGa, Romancing Saga, etc (and even got his hands on FF12, hilarious!). So it makes sense that FF2 is more like a SaGa game than an FF game. I can't recall any specifics, but I do remember at one point hearing that SaGa3/FFL3 was either spearheaded by another director, or had some heavy executive meddling to make the game easier/more traditional, which is why it stands out some much. How you people that cut your teeth on FFL/FFL2 for JRPGs, I will never understand though. I love the SaGa games to death, but I started with FF1 way back in the NES days and then tried FFL2 as a kid and nearly broke the indestructible brick in frustration. Some 10 years later or so, I discovered SaGa Frontier, which is an adorable child. So I had to play all of its brethren of course. I personally find that of all the SaGa games, FFL2 plays the most similar to SaGa Frontier in terms of party structure and leveling/development systems. It's almost a direct analog. I always end up naming my FFL2 heroes after random SaGa Frontier characters and try to mimic their builds as best the FFL2 mechanics will allow.
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Oct 23, 2014 12:33
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Choco1980 posted:Oh big time. FFL3 is the SaGa game that doesn't play by the byzantine and strict action=growth level up rules, and plays much more like a Final Fantasy, making it much more surmountable. Fittingly enough, Final Fantasy II for the Famicom plays instead like a SaGa game than like a Final Fantasy game proper. That's because they're both designed by the same man: Akitoshi Kawazu, a man who has admitted point blank that most of the games he's made aren't very good. Which is funny, because I LOVE FFL/FFL2, but absolutely cannot stand FF2.
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Oct 23, 2014 12:35
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DjinnAndTonic posted:I can't recall any specifics, but I do remember at one point hearing that SaGa3/FFL3 was either spearheaded by another director, or had some heavy executive meddling to make the game easier/more traditional, which is why it stands out some much. UmbreonMessiah posted:That's because [FF2 and FFL2 are] both designed by the same man: Akitoshi Kawazu, a man who has admitted point blank that most of the games he's made aren't very good. SaGa 3/FFL3 was directed by Kouzi Ide, someone who only has two other games under his belt. One of them is Treasure of the Rudras, a sleeper hit SNES game with a really... let's say interesting magic system. The other? Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. You can tell, too; a lot of the art assets from the original FFL3 got taken and spruced up, then used in Mystic Quest - most particularly the weapon attack animations. But yes. FFL3 is both more forgiving and more "traditional" than the usual SaGa game because it was directed by the Mystic Quest guy instead of the FF2 guy. EDIT: That may also be why it's less hilariously glitchy and/or easy to break than the first two SaGa games were. drat shame, that. KataraniSword fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 16:34
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KataraniSword posted:SaGa 3/FFL3 was directed by Kouzi Ide, someone who only has two other games under his belt. One of them is Treasure of the Rudras, a sleeper hit SNES game with a really... let's say interesting magic system. The other? It also explains why it's so easy to get the hang of and the difficulty doesn't really rise until the final act or so. I have a nasty habit of not being able to actually beat rpgs, I can count the number I have on one hand, and FFL3 was the first one I ever did. Yet, it has a really fun story (with admittedly one of the best game boy translations out there) and a lot of open-ended customization to it (it IS still a SaGa game after all) and remains probably my 2nd most favorite Game Boy game.
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Oct 23, 2014 17:11
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KataraniSword posted:SaGa 3/FFL3 was directed by Kouzi Ide, someone who only has two other games under his belt. One of them is Treasure of the Rudras, a sleeper hit SNES game with a really... let's say interesting magic system. I remember playing Treasure of the Rudras, but I can't remember a drat thing about it other than I'm pretty sure it was fun?
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Oct 23, 2014 20:15
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RabidWeasel posted:I remember playing Treasure of the Rudras, but I can't remember a drat thing about it other than I'm pretty sure it was fun? You basically made your own magic "words" by combining katakana for various effects, some obvious and others less-so. Naturally, this was the biggest hurdle to fan translations, since changing a katakana-based table to romanized alphanumerics is a nightmare and a half. It wasn't a bad game by any means, no, but it's more iconic for how hard it was to translate than for anything about its plot or gameplay. (Also for it's music, but that's to be expected from a Square game)
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Oct 23, 2014 21:25
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KataraniSword posted:You basically made your own magic "words" by combining katakana for various effects, some obvious and others less-so. My immediate reaction to this was "MALE MACO GRRE YMCA" and oh god I am such a damaged human being
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Oct 24, 2014 00:51
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KataraniSword posted:SaGa 3/FFL3 was directed by Kouzi Ide, someone who only has two other games under his belt. One of them is Treasure of the Rudras, a sleeper hit SNES game with a really... let's say interesting magic system. The other? I did not know that. I liked Legend 3 the best out of the bunch, mostly because it wasn't governed by mostly incomprehensible rules for somebody as young as I was. There's a good reason for that now.
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Oct 24, 2014 01:08
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Chokes McGee posted:My immediate reaction to this was "MALE MACO GRRE YMCA" and oh god I am such a damaged human being Augh, no, you're giving me Bard's Tale flashbacks, stoooooooooooooop  (... the only one out of those I don't remember is YMCA, was that in BT2 or BT3? I only really remember the BT1 spells sort of well)
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Oct 24, 2014 01:30
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Major Levitation, Mage Compass... Yeah, I don't remember. I would guess YMCA is the third game, since that's the one that added two new spellcaster classes.
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Oct 24, 2014 02:38
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Ybarra's Mystical Coat of Armor, you heathens! Oh wait, no one levels a Magician to level 11 except me 
Chokes McGee fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 02:42
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I just assumed the Young Men's Christian Association is a mystical word of power in this world
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Oct 24, 2014 02:48
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Drakenel posted:I just assumed the Young Men's Christian Association is a mystical word of power in this world I've heard that it is quite fun to stay there. You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal, you might even have the power to do whatever you feel. 
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Oct 24, 2014 03:06
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